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- Luke Awtry
- Mo AlDoukhi at Vermont Comedy Club
Chef Mo Aldoukhi
- Position: Head chef and kitchen manager
- Age: 23
- Cuisine type: A mix of Middle Eastern-influenced breakfast and lunch items and “drunk-people food”
- Experience: Started cooking in his mom’s restaurant in Lebanon at age 9. While attending high school in the Netherlands, he spent school breaks working at restaurants in France, the UK and Spain.
- What’s on the menu: Six varieties of breakfast burrito; chicken shawarma wraps smothered in garlic sauce with French fries and pomegranate molasses; crispy falafel burgers; fried appetizer sampler platters; nachos; and an Arabic breakfast spread with housemade hummus, baba ghanoush, labneh, cheesy za’atar omelette, pickles and pita chips
When it comes to food at a comedy club, the style is “stuff that’s easy to eat with your hands in the dark,” Vermont Comedy Club co-owner Natalie Miller said. “You don’t expect it to be good.”
As a result, touring comedians usually live on chicken fingers. But when they come to the Burlington club, they get to order beef shawarma and baba ghanoush — and so does the audience. The club’s multifaceted menu serves American bar-food hits right alongside traditional Middle Eastern dishes, thanks to head chef Mo AlDoukhi, who took over the role last November.
Now on his second menu iteration, AlDoukhi cooks up “drunk-people food” with the best of them, Miller said. “Or hungover-people food,” she added, thinking of the extensive breakfast and lunch menu at the comedy club’s daytime alter ego, Happy Place Café. “He’s a twentysomething guy; he knows what people want to eat.”
He makes damn good hummus, too. AlDoukhi is Palestinian and grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon. The recipe is his late mother’s, and Jomana’s Famous Hummus has a place of honor on the menu.
Fittingly, AlDoukhi is also an aspiring comedian. On an open-mic night, he’ll leave the kitchen to get onstage and do a set, apron still on.
“He’s dark,” Miller said with a laugh. “He’s been through some stuff, so his sense of humor is darker than most. But he’s so darn likable that he always keeps the audience on his side.”
AlDoukhi sat down with Seven Days to talk about his Middle Eastern-influenced menu and tell a few jokes.
You worked in both the box office and the kitchen when you started at Vermont Comedy Club in 2021. How did you end up as the chef?
It was one of the healthiest kitchens I’ve ever worked in, and I’ve worked in many kitchens over my 14-year career. This one, everybody liked each other. Everybody was joking around. I was like, This is not a typical kitchen.
I mentioned to Ryan [Kenyon, the club’s previous chef] that we could use another vegetarian option, like hummus. He made hummus, I tried it, and it wasn’t bad. But I was like, I’m a Middle Eastern person. I think I could do this better.
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What’s your secret?
My mom always used to say to me, “Don’t stress about it. Let the food processor do the work.”
How have you put your stamp on the menus here?
I like it when you go to a restaurant and they have their thing. My specialty is Middle Eastern food, because that’s the food I grew up cooking. I started working in my mom’s restaurant when I was 9. I picked it up so fast that when I was 11, she stopped showing up to work. I ran the kitchen for her.
But the kitchen here is much smaller than the kitchen back home, and I don’t have a shawarma cooking oven. So I’ve had to improvise.
I thought you were more of a standup guy. [Collective groan.] Are there overlaps between comedy and cooking?
How quick and to the point it should be. Less words to get to the punch line, the better — and the less words to describe what a food item has in it, the better. Everybody knows what onion rings are.
Do you cook at home?
Not really. I look at it this way: A massage therapist wouldn’t want to [give] a massage off the clock. But when we used to make bread back home for the restaurant, I would make extras for me. So technically I was cooking for myself.
Now, people are like, “Why do you have so many protein options?”
Because I’m bulking.
Do you tell fitness jokes?
I asked a friend the other day what kind of protein shake they were drinking, and they said “vegan.” I was like, “No whey?”
One I performed onstage recently: I’m making a lot of progress at the gym. I did lunges for the first time today. That was a huge step forward.
When did you get interested in comedy?
Since I was, like, 7, I’ve been watching clips in English. And I did not speak English; I just understood English. I was like, This seems sick. You can just stand onstage by yourself and make people laugh.
Once [Vermont Comedy Club] opened back up in August 2021, I took a standup class here just so I can feel more comfortable being onstage, especially that I was doing it in a second language. Nathan [Hartswick, club co-owner] taught the class and said I have an Anthony Jeselnik-style delivery, which is very dark jokes but deadpan. Then I was like, I could actually do this.
Where did you grow up?
In a small refugee camp called Rashidieh camp in Lebanon, as a Palestinian refugee. Technically, I do not have the Palestinian citizenship or the Lebanese citizenship. I was going to be like, “Per the FDA,” but the FDA has nothing to do with this.
By definition, I’m stateless. But now I’m an alien authorized to work.
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- Luke Awtry
- Southwestern breakfast burrito
What brought you to Vermont?
It’s a medium-size story. I got into a college in Indiana, but I felt like more of a performer than a student. Deep down, the reason I was good in school was to get a scholarship and get out of Lebanon. Then I did, and I was like, Well, now I’m not as passionate about studying.
I’m much more of a performer-slash-cook, which is the perfect job here. My full-time dream is performing standup for people. And then if that doesn’t work out, I can always open a Middle Eastern restaurant.
When I left college, my visa got terminated. So I ended up just trying to find places to migrate to, and Canada was [appealing] because Jim Carrey is from Canada. So I was like, Oh, they have a good comedy scene there.
I was trying to cross the border, but it was March 2020 and the taxi driver refused to take me to the border. I was googling places to stay, and I found Spectrum [Youth & Family Services in Burlington]. They didn’t have beds for a bit, so I was living in a tent. Then I got a bed and lived there for like a year and a half while I applied for asylum — I wasn’t allowed to work for the first year. Then I found the comedy club.
What a story!
Thank you. I worked hard on it. [Laughing.]
Do you tell food jokes?
All my other jokes are too dark for a newspaper. My sense of humor is mostly based on traumas I’ve been through. When I joke about it, people think I’m trying to offend them or making it up just to say a horrible thing. But no, I’m just doing a joke about a real thing that happened to me. I am saying a horrible thing, though. But I’ll add a silly pun so it’s funny.
OK, hit me with a food joke.
I have one bit that involves me making a burrito for somebody. I had stopped putting effort into making burritos, because I became very good at making burritos. But while I was getting coffee, I saw the person ordering the burrito, and he looked Latino. So I was like, Oh, now I have to actually go in the back and do a good job.
I made the best burrito I ever could. Then I ran up to him, and I was like, “Provecho.”
He was like, “What?” I said, “Provecho.” “What is that?”
“It means ‘Enjoy your meal’ in Spanish, because you’re Latino.”
He goes, “I’m not Latino. What makes you think I’m Latino?”
I was like, “You’re brown.”
“You’re brown,” he said. “Are you Latino?”
And I was like, “No.”
And he goes, “See?”
“Sí.”
[Laughing.]
It’s a very long walk to a silly little joke. I always get mistaken for being Latino, especially here.
One more?
One time, we ran out of apples in the kitchen, and Ryan told me to go get six Red Delicious apples. Me, being a second-language speaker, was like, “How do you know they’re delicious?” And he goes, “Ha ha, you’re really funny.”
I was eating apples at City Market, just trying to see if they’re tasty. I don’t know what I would have done if he told me to get six Granny Smiths.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.
